Elijah Menaḥem ben Abba Mari Ḥalfan was a kabbalist and humanist who lived in Venice. He worked as a physician and was educated in both philosophy and rabbinic literature. He was an associate of the Portuguese Jewish messianic pretender Solomon Molkho and is known for his openness to interacting with—and even teaching Hebrew to—Christian scholars.
In 1915, photographer Léon Gimpel began spending time with a group of children he had encountered in the Rue de Grenata neighborhood in Paris. It was during World War I, and the boys’ favorite…
Though this photograph of Orthodox Jews at the East River has long been captioned as having been taken on Yom Kippur, it is much more likely that it was taken on the first afternoon of Rosh Hashanah…
The Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest is the largest synagogue in Europe, and the second largest in the world, capable of accommodating three thousand people. The Moorish- and Byzantine-inspired…